Staying in Touch

As I progress through life after college, I'm finding it harder and harder to stay in touch with old friends. Interests drift apart, jobs and new friends keep us busy, and certainly, being spread out throughout the country doesn't help.

I wonder though, is it necessary to stay in touch to remain friends? I'd thought that it's a nice thing to do... With the advent of online social stalking like Facebook, it's a piece of cake to keep tabs on who lives where and does what. It'd be nice for old friends to at least care about what you're doing in life.

But does that mean we need to stay in touch consistently? Isn't that what "catching up" is all about when you finally do see that old friend again?

The key here might be to remain responsive. I've had a few people who flat out won't even respond to my e-mails and/or phone calls. When someone does that, it's essentially impossible to ever catch up. I would consider that burning the bridge. (And no, it's not entirely because I fail at life. I've seen this happen to other people close to me as well!) But as long as you leave the window open for an old friend to reach back out towards you, I think friendship will survive. 

You can't maintain all friendships, but I also don't think that you need to trade in your old friend to get a new one. As we get older, I hope that we can continue to expand our network of friends.

The Match

As I restart my blog, I think it's appropriate to provide a baseline on where I stand in life right now. I have 3 more months of medical school before I (hopefully) graduate and get my MD degree. I'm also less than a month away from Match Day.

The Match is the process residency programs use to select graduating medical students for placement. It begins much like a traditional application process to college. The students first choose which specialty they are interested in. (In my case, my specialty will be Family Medicine.) After that, students apply to multiple programs in their desired field. Most med students apply to 10~20 programs... although I've heard 40~50 depending on the competitiveness of their desired specialty. I personally only applied to 5... mostly because Family Medicine isn't a very competitive field. This is followed by interviews. Some people see this as a great opportunity to travel around the country. I saw it as a pain in the butt, because you're responsible for travel expenses. Not so fun when your current income is NEGATIVE $40,000/year!

Once you're done with your interviews, you work on your Rank Order List (ROL). You basically make a list ranking which programs you like the most. If you really didn't like a certain program, you also have the option of not placing a program on your list at all. This is important because the ROL is kind of a binding contract. By placing a program on your list (whether it's ranked #1 or #50), you are saying "I agree to work at this program if I am chosen." When finished, you submit your ROL to a central computer. Similarly, the residency programs also submit their own ranked lists, listing the interviewees that they liked the most. In the end, a computer goes through a certain algorithm to "match" applicants to residency programs based on the submitted ROLs.

And this is where I stand right now. My ROL is submitted, and I'm just waiting. March 18th is called "Match Day", because that's when all graduating medical students across the U.S. receive an envelope telling them the results that the computer popped out. I must say I'm pretty anxious to find out where I'll be working for the next 3 years of my life!